Response to the Microsoft Apache POI news
| July 30th, 2009The following is Gary Edwards’ response to the Microsoft Apache POI news. Verbose, but nonetheless interesting.
Rather than providing a generic application-neutral format for MSOffice documents and business process information workflows, Microsoft is providing a universal reader for their application specific format.
They need to own the interoperability factor. And if it means distributing the reader to other platforms and the web app services developers working those platforms, so be it. They key is in owning the interop.
I continue to believe that the only way anyone can understand what Microsoft is doing is to imagine that the choice for Microsoft is that of provisioning MSOffice with W3C compliant XHTML-CSS capabilities OR, following the ODF path and creating a standardized format out of an application specific XML encoding of MSOffice in-memory-binary-representation.
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The following is Gary Edwards’ response to the Microsoft Apache POI news. Verbose, but nonetheless interesting. Rather than providing a generic application-neutral format for MSOffice documents and business process information workflows, Microsoft is providing a universal reader for their application specific format. They need to own the interoperability factor. And if it means distributing the reader to other platforms and the web app services developers working those platforms, so be it. They key is in owning the interop.I continue to believe that the only way anyone can understand what Microsoft is doing is to imagine that the choice for Microsoft is that of provisioning MSOffice with W3C compliant XHTML-CSS capabilities OR, following the ODF path and creating a standardized format out of an application specific XML encoding of MSOffice in-memory-binary-representation.
